Edinburgh

Our favourite film festival in Scotland is back! IberoDocs, focused on documentary films by Spanish, Portuguese and Latin- American filmmakers is bringing this year 15 award- winning films (of which 14 are premieres in Scotland) cover 11 countries and 10 different languages.

Olmo Blanco’s drawings transform everyday contexts. Geometrical patterns cover walls, floors and the most common objects. His works are based on the ephemeral, in the persistent repetition of simple figures that turn into a kind of mantra, into a memory of our most recent archaeology. This is the first time that Olmo visits Edinburgh.

Documentary cinema is returning to Scotland with the second instalment of Iberodocs, the Ibero-American Documentary Film Festival. The festival aims to foster intercultural integration and to encourage audiences to reflect upon the concept of identity. And judging from this year’s programme, all manner of individual and collective identities will feature upon the screens of the Filmhouse in Edinburgh and the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow from May 14th to 24th.

In celebration of the inauguration of Iberodocs’ second season, we have arranged to meet with one of the festival’s foremost figures and a vital player in making the event a reality: Isabel Moura Mendes. An arts manager with a heritage that is half Cape Verdean, half Portuguese, she is this year’s programme curator for the Lusophone strand of films at the Iberodocs festival.

After five years in the CGAC (Centro Galego de Arte Contemporáneo – Galician Centre for Contemporary Art), Ana G. Chouciño landed in Edinburgh in 2010, in search of new experiences and professional opportunities. She is now one of the team in charge of Interview Room 11, a gallery that is home to a variety of artistic projects, with a special interest in promoting Galician artists, and building bridges between Spanish and Scottish art.